“Critical Response”catalogue essay by Lee Weng Choy Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia May 2000

In his performance, “Journey of a Yellow Man No. 11: Multiculturalism”, Lee Wen presented a paper at a conference on multiculturalism in Singapore. As “Yellow Man” he is usually painted all over in bright yellow poster colour, wears only yellow briefs and his head is shaved bald. This time he was fully clothed as he sat with his fellow panelists. During his presentation Lee Wen discussed, among other things, the prevailing conservatism in Singapore art. He was particularly critical of the national exhibition, Singapore Art ‘97 -- it had failed to engage important aspects of contemporary art, even as it claimed to encompass the full field of local practices. The exhibition, he argued, over-represented certain forms like scenic watercolours and Chinese painting and calligraphy, and under-represented installation and totally disregarded performance art. The “national” interest, it seemed, was to downplay if not ignore controversial and experimental art.

Like many others at that Substation arts centre conference, Lee Wen advocated a multiculturalism that goes beyond the state’s essentialist CMIO -- Chinese, Malay, Indian, Other -- multiracialism. After his paper, Lee Wen stepped in front of the panelists’ table. He formed symbols representing the letters C, M, I and O out of rice on the floor, then obliterated them. He stripped to his yellow briefs, got into a small bathtub and washed the yellow poster colour off. He then got out, put on some different clothes, and bottled the now yellowed bath water into several plastic containers. As he offered them to the audience to take home, he proclaimed: “Now I am a water colourist too!”

Two years later, Lee Wen was invited to participate in the sequel to Singapore Art ‘97, which was renamed after its corporate sponsor -- Nokia Singapore Art 1999. It was almost as if the organizers were attempting to address Lee Wen’s criticisms about the need to better represent contemporary art in the national exhibition. The organizers transformed the previous week-long art-fair type of event to a two-month-long festival involving multiple programmes and venues, the highlights of which were the exhibition of a curated section and a conference with local and international curators, academics and writers. Unfortunately, the show as a whole was uneven and somewhat uninspiring.

For his part, Lee Wen presented a video installation,World Class. It comprised a stuffed white globe with wings, a stuffed star in a glass case, a bunch of survey forms posted onto a wall -- asking people what they thought constituted “world class” -- and a TV covered with a long cloth funnel, through which one would peer in. On screen was Lee Wen himself, preaching like a possessed propagandist. By virtue of the force of his insistence, he called forth Singapore as a “World Class Society ... with a world class airport ... a world class government ... world class artists ... and a world class museum.” Make no mistake, there are those in Singapore who take very seriously the issue of being “world class”. In a 1997 National Day Dinner Speech, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong highlighted the role of “foreign talent” in Singapore’s future: “To be a world-class business centre we must seek out world class foreign talent to supplement our own. We must get them to work here, and better still, encourage some of them to sink roots here. The world class foreign talent will help us to make Singapore a world class city and best home for Singaporeans.”[1]

Statements like Goh’s are a hard act to follow. The problem with parody is that sometimes the “thing” itself is inadvertently far more self-parodying than any intervention. And yet for all this inadvertent self-parody, Singapore sometimes seems like a nation without irony. It is as if irony is only latent and needs awakening, remembering or defamiliarization. Parody, like what Walter Benjamin once said of criticism, is a matter of the right distance. Mimic too closely and it’s indistinguishable. Mimic too outrageously, and the joke is only one-dimensional. Lee Wen’s video is almost hypnotic in its concentrated repetition, and yet its language is almost interchangeable with the state’s. The white cloth funnel only intensifies the experience, making it less like watching a screen than being inside the dream world of ideology. Lee Wen’s commentary/parody on the state’s efforts to interpolate Singaporeans unmasks “world class” as ideological, but in its ironic way then shows how pervasive this ideology is -- laughing at it doesn’t distance us too far from it. It cuts very close.

--------

Notes:

1. The English text of Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong’s National Day Dinner Speech (in Mandarin), 31st August 1997, can be found on the Singapore Government web-site: http://www.gov.sg/mita/pressrelease/970901~1.htm